Some are born campaigners. The high drama of a finite effort is their oxygen, pizzas and news cycles are their adrenalin, spreadsheets and strategies their vice. These alpha-crusaders would happily hop from campaign to campaign throughout the year.

A rare few do. They concentrate largely in the serviced offices and evening bars of Westminster. It’s hard to have a regular conversation with many of them because the intensity of their political efforts saturates their lives. It’s a worthy, if consuming, existence, and not one most would choose.

But, as last month’s Total Politics showed, political campaigning and consulting in the UK have grown up. New groups, built on innovative methods and learning from successful organisations in the charitable, third and even private sectors worldwide, are proliferating. And many are achieving increasing influence over the establishment.

Most notably, the group 38 Degrees has become a phenomenon. Earlier this year, it mobilised over 500,000 people in the UK, including in the Tory shires, to sign an online petition opposing the proposed part-privatisation of the forests. Around 100,000 emails were sent to MPs, urging them to vote down the plans. That sustained campaign (which built a coalition of urban progressives and rural conservationists), and another against the planned NHS reforms – it quickly gathered nearly half a million supporters, and raised some £147,000 for newspaper advertising and legal support – helped force two sharp government about-turns.

As David Babbs, executive director of 38 Degrees, told the Huffington Post UK in July: “Traditional political institutions weren't working for us. We were inspired by other groups around the world, like Get Up in Australia, Move On in the US and Avaaz globally. We borrowed their ideas and tried to do something similar in the UK.” Babbs says the group’s success tells us “something about the hunger, among 38 Degrees members and the UK more broadly, for institutions that are genuinely responsive to them”. In other words: society was always civil, not statist, and effective modern campaigns must recognise that.

Some of this new, smarter campaigning is enabled by the connecting and democratising power of the internet. Indeed, few tools in history have better amplified the public square and provided such an opportunity for mass mobilisation against unaccountable power. The web can make even the most remote person feel part of something empowering.

It helps, of course, that the coalition government, with all its idiosyncrasies and exposed flanks, is vulnerable to the point of malleability. But it’s also true that the success of new campaigns in changing the government’s course is breeding an expanding confidence to take on more ambitious targets. Recently, for example, the Political Scrapbook and Liberal Conspiracy blogs, relative online old-timers, developed a tool that let the public tweet directly to the many different companies advertising in the News of the World. They expressed their disgust over the phone hacking affair. One by one, advertisers withdrew from the paper. We all know what happened next.

The two key insights into this type of campaigning are simple: people are increasingly living their lives online, from accessing information and finding a spouse to being politically active. And if an issue resonates with them – contrary to persistent talk of modern apathy – they're willing to act to force real results.

38 Degrees, Avaaz, Political Scrapbook, Change.org, UK Uncut and others understand the need to harness human capital, to build agile, activist-led, news and issue-driven, participatory campaigns which organise protestors online and mobilise in the real world. It delivers rapid, tangible results for the 'instant gratification' age. That understanding applies outside politics, too: in the not-for-profit sector, See the Difference enables people who give small donations to charity to see the impact their gift has through online interaction and video. The hope is that, by articulating the importance of micro-donations, it will help increase small charitable giving in the UK in the coming years.

We sought to bring this understanding of modern campaigns to Ed Miliband’s Labour leadership bid last year. We cast Miliband as the insurgent against his establishment elder brother, and built our message around the people who were fuelling the campaign – the party membership – rather than the candidate. As a result, we raised more money, from more people, through small online donations than any other leadership election campaign in British political history, and recruited thousands of volunteers. Our campaign slogan, ‘Powered by People’, which reflected our approach, has now been adopted by the Labour Party and the official Ken Livingstone campaign for the London mayoralty. It could be the beginning of a fightback: up to now, the campaigning mechanisms supporting Boris Johnson’s re-election have blown Ken’s out of the water.

Labour’s campaigning activity has a long way to go. Its main online hub, the Campaign Engine Room, a brazen email harvester with little social or relational resonance, looks more like a Jackson Pollock than a well-oiled public access tool. And Refounding Labour, the short initiative to open the party to new ideas, has been a damp squib. The new party general secretary, Iain McNicol, will need to bolster his campaigns capacity quickly when he takes charge in September.

The ultimate purpose of campaigning is to reach the electorate. A great political campaign transcends politics and inspires ordinary people to take action. If McNicol, or any other campaigns chief, is to build a modern campaigning machine, he’ll need constantly to challenge conventional wisdom. He’ll need to enable community and competition, and develop the tools and mentality to get people to participate. As so many outside organisers have proven to the political parties this year, that’s the only way to deliver change in the networked age.

Alex Smith is former director of online communications and campaigns to Ed Miliband. He is now a consultant for Champollion Digital

Tags: Alex Smith, Champollion Digital, Digital campaigning, Ed Miliband, Labour Party